Quotes

It is safer that a bad man should not be accused, than that he should be acquitted.

Whatever you think of de Sade, he was a complex figure and we should not look for easy answers with him. He was, strangely perhaps, against the death penalty, and he was never put in prison for murders or anything like that.

America is the land of the second chance – and when the gates of the prison open, the path ahead should lead to a better life.

The common argument that crime is caused by poverty is a kind of slander on the poor.

On average, drug prisoners spend more time in federal prison than rapists, who often get out on early release because of the overcrowding in prison caused by the Drug War.

Once we are destined to live out our lives in the prison of our mind, our duty is to furnish it well.

I wrote a million words in the first year, and I could never have done that outside of prison.

I was in prison, and you came unto me. Verily I say unto you, inasmuch as ye have done it unto one of the least of these my brethren, ye have done it unto me.
~(Jesus Christ) Matthew 25:36, 40

Why would anyone expect him to come out smarter? He went to prison for three years, not Princeton.

Man is born free, and everywhere he is in chains.

Prisons don't rehabilitate, they don't punish, they don't protect, so what the hell do they do?

Before we can diminish our sufferings from the ill-controlled aggressive assaults of fellow citizens, we must renounce the philosophy of punishment, the obsolete, vengeful penal attitude. In its place we would seek a comprehensive, constructive social attitude - therapeutic in some instances, restraining in some instances, but preventive in its total social impact. In the last analysis this becomes a question of personal morals and values. No matter how glorified or how piously disguised, vengeance as a human motive must be personally repudiated by each and every one of us.

Wicked deeds are generally done, even with impunity, for the mere desire of occupation.

I don't like being famous - it is like a prison. And driving for Ferrari would make it far worse.

If punishment reaches not the mind and makes not the will supple, it hardens the offender.

Body is a home, a prison and a grave.

The number of laws is constantly growing in all countries and, owing to this, what is called crime is very often not a crime at all, for it contains no element of violence or harm.

The punishment can be remitted; the crime is everlasting.

As we grow in wisdom, we pardon more freely.

It is the spirit and not the form of law that keeps justice alive.

The penalty for laughing in a courtroom is six months in jail; if it were not for this penalty, the jury would never hear the evidence.

We have our own system, ... and journalists in our system are not put in prison for embarrassing the government by revealing things the government might not wish to have revealed. The important thing is that our system, under which journalists can write without fear or favor, should continue.

Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere. We are caught in an inescapable network of mutuality, tied in a single garment of destiny. Whatever affects one directly, affects all indirectly.

Nor cell, nor chain, nor dungeon speaks to the murderer like the voice of solitude.